Behind The Story   

The good news out of the Exhibition and Convention Executives Forum is that most leaders of the tradeshow industry remain optimistic about their future. Some of the shock that many experienced at the end of last year and during the first quarter of this year as customers were canceling contracts and attendees were not registering for events seems to have worn off.

The attitude at the event attended by more than 200 executives in Washington, D.C., Thursday was more along the lines of “We’ll get through this somehow; the only question is how.” That is what led to discussions of discounts on material handling for exhibitors, “decompression zones” at the entry to showfloors and calls to confirm the benefits of business travel.

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My colleagues Joalien Johnson and Rachel Wimberly came back Wednesday from E³ Expo with their expectations confirmed: The old E³  is back.

You’ll read more about it in their story in the next issue of Tradeshow Week, but suffice it to say that the glitter, the noise, the booth babes – and the excitement – have returned.

You probably already know the back story: The Entertainment Software Assn. and E³ exhibitors decided a few years ago that less would be more. So they revamped and downsized the even...Read More

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At an industry meeting I attended not too long ago, a session panelist said, “Don’t let a good recession go to waste.”

Like most business publications these days, Tradeshow Week has its share of discouraging news to report – don’t think I haven’t heard reactions to our “Q1 a Downer” headline in the May 25 issue – but there also are plenty of occasions to report on developments that may end up being positive paradigm shifters.

Some of those potential paradigm shifters are either going to stretch the limits of what show managers considered their prerecession job descriptions or they’re going to stir concerns that arose in the last economic downturn that tradeshows are som...Read More

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The Center for Exhibition Industry Research has released its first-quarter index of tradeshow industry performance. The quick headline version is, of course: Not good.

When you see our quarterly report of tradeshow statistics in a few days, the news will be more or less the same. Our editors are still working on the numbers, but it is safe to say that the story will be something similar.

However, it does look at this point like the picture CEIR paints is a bit grimmer than the one we will paint. (Keep in mind, we’re still checking the math.) According to CEIR, net square footage in the first quarter of this year was down 14.8 percent; revenue, 19.7 percent; attendance 1.5 percent; and number of exhibiting companies, 10.4 ...Read More

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For the last week or so we’ve been slicing and dicing the 2009 Tradeshow Week 200. While there aren’t too many surprises – ever – at the top, when you look at it in terms of our different sub-readerships (TSW Las Vegas or TSW MedShow Report, for instance), it gets to be a bit more interesting.

Now, granted: The stats we have on shows are from 2008 and just about anybody could plead confusion when trying to draw conclusions about the tradeshow industry last year. The first couple of quarters were almost – but not quite – business as usual and the third and fourth quarters were anything but.

And there is no denying that, across the board, it was a tough year for the industry’s biggest show...Read More

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Last Thursday we broke the news on our Web site that the Food Marketing Institute was canceling its MARKETECHNICS show scheduled to start Wednesday. Sue me for being cynical, but, at the time, I thought that the next few days would be telling: Either we’d get more news of show cancellations or we’d figure out that MARKETECHNICS might have been having trouble with pre-registration anyway and a potential pandemic provided a convenient excuse.

The good news is that there haven’t been any more cancellations – yet.

I haven’t been able to determine to my satisfaction yet whether the mainstream media has overplayed this swine flu story or is incredibly...Read More

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The biggest developing story during the weekend was the appearance of swine flu in Mexico and the startlingly swift response from a number of government officials, particularly in the United States.

The first impulse is to draw comparisons to the SARS outbreaks of five years ago. SARS was an acronym for severe acute respiratory syndrome, which, according to the World Health Organization, struck more than 8,000 people around the world and killed nearly 800, primarily in Asia...Read More

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You’ve got to sympathize with the position Eric Allen finds himself in. As executive vice president and head of the Healthcare Convention & Exhibitors Assn., he is busy herding cats of several different colors – all because of what appears to be an unrelenting drive toward the ultimate separation of church and state in the world of health care marketing.

The latest challenge is a commentary in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. that calls on professional medical associations to stop taking money from pharmaceutical and medical device firms, the traditional funding sources for much of the continuing medical education at their conventions and meetings.

This follows on the heels of a revision of the PhRMA Code...Read More

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The news remains worse for some shows and destinations than others. We reported yesterday on our Web site that attendance at tradeshows, conventions and business meetings in Las Vegas was down 35 percent in February, compared with the same month last year. That translates into 300,000 fewer people visiting the city. Never mind the smaller number of leisure visitors showing up; that’s somebody else’s problem.

Lobbying by hospitality industry leaders seems to have helped a little. President Obama has lain off tarring everybody who takes a business trip with the same brush. Still, there is no doubt that companies have taken advantage of the public pressure to cut back substantially on meetings, conferences and their participatio...Read More

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Our directories editors are busy putting the final touches on the latest edition of the Tradeshow Week 200, which should be released to the public in the next couple of weeks. I can tell you this right now: There won’t be too many surprises at the top; you top dogs know who you are.

A couple of nuggets of information I’ve seen that did cause me to scratch my head: Over the last 10 years of the TSW 200, from 1998 through 2008, the accumulated net square footage of all 200 shows has only grown 0.8 percent. The number of exhibitors in the 200 shows has grown 0.3 percent and attendance has remained virtually flat.

While shows come and go from the list and certain ones – primarily those at the top – keep getti...Read More

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The meat-and-potatoes bottom line on the SISO CEO Summit is fairly easy to capsulate: Things are tough in the tradeshow world, as tough as many people can ever remember – but they’re going to get better.

There.

We will be filling in that particular story line on the Society of Independent Show Organizers’ meeting this week in San Diego in more detail in the next issue of Tradeshow Week, but that’s the gist.

It only took 75 words to write that, allowing me a few hundred more to talk about something else I thought was interesting, albeit perhaps not the No. 1 topic everybody went to ...Read More

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In the last 24 hours alone, I have heard from the following industry organizations regarding some aspect of a campaign to inform political leaders and the public of the value of meetings and tradeshows, business travel, face-to-face marketing, etc.:

-         Intl. Assn. of Exhibitions & Events

-         D...Read More

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